Anna Nicole Smith's death comes five
months after the mysterious death
of her grown son.

HOLLYWOOD, Fla. – Anna Nicole Smith, a curvaceous blonde whose life played out as an extraordinary tabloid tale, died yesterday after collapsing at a hotel. She was 39.

Smith – a Playboy centerfold, jeans model, widow of an octogenarian oil tycoon and reality-show star – was stricken while staying at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino and was rushed to a hospital.

The Broward County Medical Examiner's Office said the cause of death was under investigation and that an autopsy would be done today. The county's chief medical examiner, Dr. Joshua Perper, said definitive results could take weeks.

Seminole Police Chief Charlie Tiger said a private nurse called 911 after finding Smith unresponsive in her sixth-floor room at the hotel. He said Smith's bodyguard administered CPR, but she was declared dead at a hospital at 2:49 p.m. Later, two sheriff's deputies carried from Smith's hotel room at least eight brown-paper bags sealed with red evidence tape.

A paramedic with the Hollywood Fire Rescue Department said Smith was not breathing when he and other rescue workers reached her hotel suite, and that they had tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to restore her heartbeat.

“There was just no way of knowing how long she'd been down before she was discovered,” Capt. Dan Fitzgerald, told a television station. He said Smith's companion, Howard K. Stern, was in the room when the rescue team arrived and had provided her medical history.

Smith's death came just five months after her 20-year-old son, Daniel, died mysteriously at her hospital bedside in the Bahamas, where Smith had given birth to a daughter.

A lawyer for Smith, Ronald Rale, said she had complained of flulike symptoms earlier in the week and was “run down” from her recent troubles. He would not say why she was visiting Florida, but a spokesman for the hotel said Smith had stayed there several times since it opened in 2004.

“She was trying her hardest,” Rale said in a news conference at his law office in Los Angeles. “I grieve for Anna Nicole that she had to endure what she had to endure. I just pray that that's not what precipitated this.”

The hotel said Smith had checked in Monday and was scheduled to leave today. Her daughter was not with her, and sources said the child was being cared for in the Bahamas.

With her own reality-TV series, her marriage to an 89-year-old oil tycoon and subsequent court battles over his fortune, Anna Nicole Smith provided
consistent tabloid fodder. News of her death was the top story on several cable channels and celebrity Web sites.

Since 1990s, Smith had been famous for being famous, a pop-culture punch line because of her up-and-down weight, her Marilyn Monroe looks, her exaggerated curves, her little-girl voice, her ditzy-blonde persona and her over-the-top, revealing outfits.

Smith starred in her own reality-TV series, “The Anna Nicole Show,” from 2002 to 2004 on the E! cable channel. Cameras followed her around as she sparred with her lawyer, hung out with her personal assistant and interior decorator and cooed at her poodle, Sugar Pie.

She also appeared in some movies, performing a bit part in “The Hudsucker Proxy” in 1994.

Recently, she lost a reported 69 pounds and became a spokeswoman for TrimSpa, a weight-loss supplement. She and the company were named in a class-action lawsuit earlier this month over the marketing of the supplement.

On her reality show and other recent TV appearances, Smith's speech was often slurred and she seemed disoriented. Some critics said she seemed to be on drugs.

CNN's Larry King said yesterday that Smith once showed up on his set intoxicated. The buxom starlet reportedly did at least one stint at the Betty Ford Center more than a decade ago.

“Undoubtedly it will be found at the end of the day that drugs featured in her death as they did in the death of poor Daniel,” said Michael Scott, a former attorney for Smith in the Bahamas.

Another former Smith attorney, Lenard Leeds, told the celebrity-gossip Web site TMZ that Smith “always had problems with her weight going up and down, and there's no question she used alcohol.” Leeds said it was no secret that “she had a very troubled life” and had “so many, many problems.”

Rale dismissed claims that Smith's death was drug-related as “a bunch of nonsense.”

Smith was apparently under the care of a private nurse, which suggests she might have been taking medications that required monitoring. She had been hospitalized with pneumonia and a collapsed lung in November.

Witnesses at the Florida hotel where Smith died reported that earlier in the week she needed help standing up and sitting down.

“She was completely out of it,” Ron Hanson, a 57-year-old retiree, told the Orlando Sentinel.

The Texas-born Smith was a topless dancer at strip club before she entered her photos in a search contest and made the cover of Playboy magazine in 1992. She became Playboy's Playmate of the Year in 1993. She was also signed to a contract with Guess jeans, appearing in TV commercials, on billboards and in magazine ads.

In 1994, she married 89-year-old oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall II, owner of Great Northern Oil Co., whom she had met while she was a stripper. In 1992, Forbes magazine estimated his wealth at $550 million.

Marshall died in 1995 at age 90, setting off a feud with Smith's former stepson, E. Pierce Marshall, over his estate. A federal court in California awarded Smith $474 million. That decision was later overturned.

In May, the Supreme Court revived the case, ruling that the dispute properly belonged in federal court, giving Smith another chance to collect millions. The case was still pending at the time of her death.

On Sept. 7, she gave birth to a daughter, Dannielynn, in the Bahamas. Three days later, Daniel Smith died in his mother's hospital room.

An American medical examiner hired by the family, Cyril Wecht, said Daniel Smith died accidentally of a combination of methadone and two antidepressants. Last month, a Bahamas magistrate scheduled a formal inquiry into the death for March 27.

Meanwhile, the paternity of Smith's now-5-month-old daughter remains a matter of dispute. The birth certificate lists Dannielynn's father as Stern, Smith's most recent companion. But Smith's ex-boyfriend Larry Birkhead is waging a legal challenge, saying he is the father. An emergency hearing in the paternity case was scheduled for today in Los Angeles.